Yeah I'm 11 days in on Epic Seven. Have had pretty bad luck on rolls, but I did reroll accounts till I started with Iseria, because she's great (and a little unique in the sea of Destina and Sez accounts).

This is pretty big deal for a lot of raisins, but maybe the biggest is their 88/12 revenue split vs. Steam's 70/30. Valve just announced they'll be taking less of a cut in some cases, but only for big name AAA blockbuster stuff; there will be no tiers like that on Epic's new store, so everyone gets their 88%, big fish or small fish. Furthermore, UE4 devs will have their engine royalty covered by Epic.

Steam has made questionable moves in a lot of areas for a while now, from revenue to community management to support to curation and discovery, and it kinda looks like Epic has paid attention to all of that and is designing their platform to tackle those problems right out of the gate.

It could still take years for it to become a viable Steam competitor, even with all that Fortnite traffic, but it'll be fascinating to watch.

While it is nice to have all (or most of) my games in the same place, I don't specifically have any loyalty to Steam and welcome alternatives. Origin had some growing pains but is a solid platform these days. Uplay even is getting less intrusive which is a good sign.

The opposite of that is the Microsoft/Windows Store. It was the only way to get State of Decay 2, and then it obfuscates everything, I had to look online to find even where the game installs (spoiler: it's in a locked system folder so you have to mess with permissions to even look inside as local admin), and the game doesn't let you save screenshots or tell you where savegames are. I had to do the old printscreen and tab out to photoshop to paste the screenshot nonsense just to get that image for my GOTY coverage.

That reminds me I was following a really good well-made LiS fan comic on Tumblr for a while but totally lost track of it. I wonder if they finished up or are somehow still going even with the official comics kinda-sorta telling the same story now.

Oh yeah, LiS2 Episode 2 drops in January.

In other news, following up on the Epic Store chat in the Game Awards thread, seems like they're giving away a new free game every two weeks. I'm sure that for every current-year surprise freebie like Subnautica there'll be at least one old thing everyone already has like Super Meat Boy, but yo that's a lot of free games assuming they keep that up for a decent stretch. Helluva way to come at Steam swingin'.

Kinda Funny just did their big showcase thing, it's all here if you got an hour.

if not, here's the trailers that stood out the most to me, your canary in the coal mine - most don't have exact individual cuts on youtube yet, so I dunno, have timestamps for the big one above, I guess.

...and of course the new Judgement trailer I already tossed over the in Yakuza thread.

not all of these (or any?) are debut announcements and a couple are actually fresh trailers for ports of games that have already been out a while elsewhere, but whatever, they're new if you haven't seen 'em yet. I'll embed 'em below if/when they turn up cut outta the main showcase.